Question 6

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Throughout the project I have improved my skills in both editing and filming. With the camera I have learnt the importance of manual settings and how to utilise them and from within what circumstances to use them and I have become more decisive in terms of editing and decision making. This interest in manual settings upon the camera came about when after a shoot we realised that half way through the shoot a number of shots had had their colour grading edited giving them a washed out effect meaning that we could not use them in our final sequence. 

I have become a lot more confident with the different software used in creating films on the computer. For example, I now know my way around Adobe Premiere Pro and know various shortcuts and  tools to help make editing a lot easier. We extended our knowledge of the software by using different video effects and transitions such as editing the Brightness and Contrast of a shot to make it look entirely different. This can be seen on all of our shots within the forest as we wanted to create a gloomy, eerie atmosphere to set the mood for the rest of our film. Along with Adobe softwares we also used Live Type on a Macintosh, this was used to create and animate the titles within our opening sequence.

I think that for our entire the group the most valuable thing we learnt was the importance of lighting. Lighting had an enormous effect on how our project played out as we originally wanted to film at night to cause the murderers hiding the body to seem more realistic and believable however it immediately became apparent that we did not have the sort of technology available to properly light our shoot. After changing the timing at which our opening sequence was set we soon learnt how to frame our shots so it appeared to be of a similar time of day to the other shots. This was very important as we wanted to remember our preliminary task and how important continuity is.

As you can tell from this shot we have various lighting issues such as camera lens glare and beams of light shining through the trees, we decided to ignore these issues as overall we agreed that the shot worked. However we still had to heavily edit the shot to reduce the glare on the camera and increase the contrast of the shot to make it more enigmatic and ominous.